The Origins of Free Software
Before you start to contribute to free and open source software projects or join their communities, you should probably know something about the nature and philosophies of FOSS and how it got where it is today.
In the early days of computers, all software was free to acquire, use, inspect, modify, and share. Researchers, computer operators, and computer hardware manufacturers all gladly distributed their software works to others. At the time, the profits were in the hardware sold, not in the software that ran on it. No one had yet considered that software could be a revenue stream, largely because each model of hardware was highly specialized, such that the software written for one model would not run on another. ...
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